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Sunday, December 16, 2012

John Wayne and Magical Velveeta Cheese

Here’s an oldie…written in November, that
unfortunately never got posted due to the lack of internet connectivity
here: even when you “have” internet, the
reso is so bad and slow, that things don’t work anyways and you might as well
just not have Internet at all….

November 19, 2012

What?...a
new blog post….only five days after the last one? Yup, that’s right. I have internet again! And again, I am in village, sitting in the
comforts of my house, listening to the crickets and toads outside (they’re
quite loud, but I’ll take them any day over the horrendous, ear-wrenching noise
of donkeys), as I work on my computer.
And once again, I’m in the process of trying to upload some stuff and
read some emails.

Tomorrow is
marché day, so as soon as I’m done with my morning classes (just 2 hours of
math tomorrow: 7-8am and 8-9am), I’ll be hopping on my bike and pedaling the
short 15 minutes to my market.

At the market! Lots of veggies to buy, such as cabbage and eggplant (bottom left),and hot spicy peppers (right). Note the women with the bike, carrying her babyon her back while trying to maneuver through the "aisles."

Caterpillars, anyone? Such a delicacy! Really, they are, and actually, they aren'ttoo bad! I have tried them: my friends sauteed thhem in oil and onions, and also served them in a tomatosauce over rice. Not too bad! Mhmm mhmm.

the marche

It really
is quite a nice bike ride. The path
winds and curves, with trees branches to duck from every now and then, as well
as the occasional big rock to swerve around, not to mention herds of animals
(cows, sheep, and goats) crossing in front of me. In general, this area has a lot of animals,
primarily due to the fact that the river isn’t too far away, so at the very
least (and during the driest of months) there’s bound to be at least one water
source. Also, we have a lot of Peuhl
people, and what they know and do is animals.
Basically, they’re kinda like nomads, in that they wander around with
their animals, packing up and moving the entire village when necessary. Tangent: it’s the Peuhl women who bring
calabashes of fresh milk on their heads to the marché – and I buy this milk
(and boil it to kill any weird stuff living in it) and either drink it as hot
chocolate or make it into cheese. Mhmm,
mhmm!

My milk ladies! Peuhl women selling milk at the marche. The milk is in the tan bowls (called calabashes --- dried gourds), and generally, the women carry these bowls are their heads when they walk throughout the marche. How they manage not to spill is beyond me...

But in recent years, the Peuhls
have started to settle down, remaining in village, learning French and other
local languages in the village even though they have their own language
(Fufuldi), and sending their kids to school.
However, what they still live and breathe is animals. While the well-off villager might own a bull
or two for plowing fields, a couple donkeys for pulling carts, some goats or
sheep, and a handful of chickens, the Peuhls have HERDS of animals. As in hundreds of four-legged creatures that
bring “traffic” (i.e. other donkey carts, kids on bicycles, mom’s walking with
babies on their backs…etc.) to a halt as we wait for all the animals to
lethargically cross the road with their “herdsman” trailing in the dust storm
behind them. The herdsmen are often just
little boys ages 5-15 who weren’t lucky enough to get to go to school and are
dressed in rags and probably carry a stick to hit the cows with and get to
spend their whole day following the herd and leading it to water or other fresh
sources of vegetation to eat….which sometimes means villagers’ corn fields… But, in all seriousness, the herds of
animals, quite seriously, are reminiscent of a scene from a John Wayne western
movie! The wild, wild west is alive and
kicking, here in WEST Africa!

Anyways,
speaking of Peuhls and herds of animals and dairy products (i.e. calabashes of
milk), Molly opened a package of Velveeta cheese yesterday! It was magical. Thanks Molly’s parents! And thank you, Kraft, for inventing one of the
best things ever: fake cheese that tastes really good and melts and makes amazing
American comfort food (like the mac-n-cheese we ate yesterday for lunch, or the
grilled cheese sandwiches we made ourselves today!) and can be shipped to anywhere,
even Burkina Faso without going bad. And
even if it does go bad, it’s still edible!
Yes, this is a fact. We may or
may not have given in to eating semi-questionable looking cheese when we made
chili and quesadillas for Halloween.
According to the date on the package, it was definitely expired by a few
months...but we opened it up anyways. It
had multiple weird colored spots on it, and its scent wasn’t quite like
Velveeta normally is, nor was the taste quite up to par, but it still melted
and still tasted pretty decent compared to many things we come across in
Burkina. So we decided to go with it,
hoping it wouldn’t make us sick. We cut
off the weird spots, and then went crazy making cheese filled quesadillas. We also made the tortillas ourselves, of
course. I don’t think I’ll ever go back
to buying tortillas. Homemade is
definitely the way to go, even if it takes some time to roll out the little
circles of dough… Anyways, we each ate
more than our share of questionable cheese that night, and no one got
sick! Hence, Velveeta does not go bad, and,
as previously stated, is magical!

One of the feasts Molly and I were able to make possible due to the lovely items sent in Molly's care package: Fritos and velveeta cheese. Molly likes to call this tasty creation "Chili cheese pie" and the chili was delicious -- with local beans and rice in it, along with a few random things like gumbo (okra) and eggplant.